Monday, September 06, 2004

Small Coffins

Television news programs showed processions of coffins in muddy fields where more than 150 people were buried Monday after the three-day siege at the school last week that left at least 338 people dead, about half of them children. Mourners left candles at makeshift shrines but also bottles of water, which the hostage-takers had denied their captives . . . .

Taking an unusually harsh tone, newspapers and independent commentators said the government of President Vladimir V. Putin had failed to protect its citizens from an escalating campaign of terrorism or to be honest about that campaign's roots in the decade-long war in the breakaway republic of Chechnya.

Because the horrors of the Russian hostage crisis are beyond our poor powers to depict, we commend you to Jeanne D'Arc.